Brown researchers have helped to confirm the idea that the surface of Phobos contains tons of dust, soil, and rock blown off the Martian surface by large projectile impacts. That means a sample-return mission planned by the Russian space agency could sample two celestial bodies for the price of one.

Astronomers viewing our solar system's asteroid belt with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have seen for the first time an asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel.

Over billions of years, small black holes can slowly grow into supermassive black holes by taking on mass from their surroundings, and also by merging with other black holes. But this slow process can't explain how supermassive black holes existing in the early universe would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. New findings from a group of Caltech researchers help to test a model that solves this problem.

Last year when a team of astronomers led by a Michigan State University professor discovered two black holes in a collection of stars known as a globular cluster, they weren't sure if their presence was a common occurrence or a unique stroke of luck.

A team of astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the University of Hyogo used the Subaru Prime Focus Camera (Suprime-Cam) mounted on the Subaru Telescope to observe faint asteroids with highly inclined orbits. They found that a smaller fraction of tiny bodies occur among high-inclination asteroids than those near the ecliptic plane.

NASA has selected nine research teams from seven states for a new institute that will bring researchers together in a collaborative virtual setting to focus on questions concerning space science and human space exploration.

Researchers from Europe and the USA have ruled out a multitude of possible parameters for dark photons - a type of dark matter and energy - with the help of white dwarfs. In some aspects, the shining of these dying stars gives more information on dark forces than is provided by earth-based laboratories.

The international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) office awarded contracts to prepare for the world's largest radio telescope yesterday, marking the start of the return on Australia and WA's investment in the ambitious Square Kilometre Array.